Centrerion Canadian Politics

Del.Icio.Us Explained, Digg Exposed, Centrerion Readers Win

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You likely noticed that a few things have been added to Centrerion: Canadian Politics recently. The following is a little explanation of the new features, and why we added them. The main idea is to offer more value to you, our readers, while increasing our readership.

The most important recent addition are Bookmark in Del.Icio.Us links you'll see at the bottom of every post. The idea of bookmarking in Del.Icio.Us is that you can have your bookmarks stored online (at del.icio.us), so you can access them from any computer worldwide. At the same time, you help spread/share your interests with like-minded people.

This is done by 'tagging' the posts you've bookmarked, which consists of using search engine like keywords to describe the content in the post. The more people who bookmark and tag the posts, the more popular they'll be on del.icio.us. At the same time, Yahoo's search engine considers this popularity in offering search results. So you can pass on articles you like through del.icio.us directly, and by extension through Yahoo. In effect, it makes your opinion heard.

Note, del.icio.us competes with a similar website called Digg.com. As I understand their privacy policy (not a legal opinion, just my understanding), Digg does not respect your privacy as much. While we'd appreciate similar bookmarking and tagging at Digg as we hope you'll do for us with del.icio.us, you should know that your email could be sold/leased to third parties by Digg. Their privacy policy reads:

"Will Digg Share Any of the Information it Receives?

Information about our users is an integral part of our business. We neither rent nor sell your personal information to anyone. We share your personal information only as described below.

* Business Transfers:
In some cases, we may choose to buy or sell assets. In these types of transactions, user information is typically one of the business assets that is transferred. Moreover, if Digg, or substantially all of its assets, were acquired, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred."

As I read it, then, Digg considers your personal information an asset, and as such, it can be sold or leased. The keyword here is "moreover." This suggests that it's not only if they're merged with or bought out that your information will transfer, but this may also be possible in the course of regular business otherwise. I'm not suggesting it's likely (can you tell I'm nervous about Digg's lawyers?), but it looks like a possibility to me, based on the text of their privacy policy.

Del.icio.us' program has a similar stipulation that if merged with/acquired, your information will be transferred to the acquirer, but it won't sell your information itself. In addition, it will notify users of the transfer, and so you can delete your account before any merger/acquisition.

"You can delete your Yahoo! account by visiting our Account Deletion page. Please click here to read about information that might possibly remain in our archived records after your account has been deleted."

Another thing we have added is trackbacks. This is mainly for fellow bloggers and web publishers, who, having discussed one of our posts on their website, can leave a message, similar to a comment, of their post discussing us. That way, the people who read the original post can read more of the discussion on the topic at the other website. This sort of linking and networking is called trackbacks.

Lastly, and our fellow publishers and bloggers should really jump at this business opportunity, we are now working with Text Link Ads. Publishers can sell links from their website, as well as refer other people to the service. Each referral who signs up is worth $25 to the referrer. That said, it's a good business opportunity (though to be honest, I've heard that search engines are wary of people selling links)*, even if you only sign up to become a referrer. If you want to join, we'd appreciate you going by clicking on our link, or on the ads in our sidebar.

*Update: That has since been contradicted by other search engine experts' opinions I've read. The SEO experts don't really agree on this. The best explanation I understood was that the link sellers' outgoing links are just disregarded by Google, if Google sees they sell links. The way around this is the "nofollow" tag, which lets Google differentiate between links to 'click' on and check out and those to ignore. The point is that your own website likely won't be affected, but those purchasing links from you for Google optimization may not get what they're paying for (I haven't seen any data/opinions on Yahoo or other engines).

Articles relating to
online networking, search engines, readership:

1. Carnival trackbacks (carnivals used for networking)
2. Who some of our readers are (readership) MSN vs Google; Centrerion: Canadian Politics' global readership (eradership and search engines)
   
3. Centrerion is #1 for moderate analysis (search engines)

posted by lecentre @ 9:14 p.m.